Related papers: Open-TQ-Metal: Fused Compressed-Domain Attention f…
KV-cache quantization is framed as a quality--latency trade-off. We show it is \emph{inverted} on Apple Silicon's unified memory: a single fused Metal kernel (sign-randomized FFT $+$ per-channel $\lambda$ $+$ per-group abs-max $+$ int4…
KV cache quantization reduces the memory cost of long-context LLM inference, but introduces approximation error that is typically validated only empirically. Existing systems rely on average-case robustness, with no mechanism to detect or…
LLMs are seeing growing use for applications which require large context windows, and with these large context windows KV cache activations surface as the dominant contributor to memory consumption during inference. Quantization is a…
KV cache quantization can improve Large Language Models (LLMs) inference throughput and latency in long contexts and large batch-size scenarios while preserving LLMs effectiveness. However, current methods have three unsolved issues:…
Large language models (LLMs) rely on key-value (KV) caches for efficient autoregressive decoding; however, cache size grows linearly with context length and model depth, becoming a major bottleneck in long-context inference. Prior KV cache…
Large Language Models (LLMs) face limitations due to the high demand on GPU memory and computational resources when handling long contexts. While sparsify the Key-Value (KV) cache of transformer model is a typical strategy to alleviate…
Large language model (LLM) inference demands significant amount of computation and memory, especially in the key attention mechanism. While techniques, such as quantization and acceleration algorithms, like FlashAttention, have improved…
Compressing the KV cache is a required step to deploy large language models on edge devices. Current quantization methods compress storage but fail to reduce bandwidth as attention calculation requires dequantizing keys from INT4/INT8 to…
Large language models have revolutionized data processing in numerous domains, with their ability to handle extended context reasoning receiving notable recognition. To speed up inference, maintaining a key-value (KV) cache memory is…
The Key-Value (KV) cache is central to the efficiency of transformer-based large language models (LLMs), storing previously computed vectors to accelerate inference. Yet, as sequence length and batch size grow, the cache becomes a major…
When transformer-based language models are deployed for text generation, most of the inference time is spent in the decoding stage, where output tokens are generated sequentially. Reducing the hardware cost of each decoding step is…
A systematic understanding of Apple Silicon is lacking in the current landscape of hardware efficiency; research focus is largely centered on accelerating GPUs for large-scale training or inference on CUDA devices. This paper investigates…
Recently, large language models (LLMs) have been able to handle longer and longer contexts. However, a context that is too long may cause intolerant inference latency and GPU memory usage. Existing methods propose mixed-precision…
Processing long-context inputs with large language models presents a significant challenge due to the enormous memory requirements of the Key-Value (KV) cache during inference. Existing KV cache compression methods exhibit noticeable…
Multi-agent LLM systems on edge devices face a memory management problem: device RAM is too small to hold every agent's KV cache simultaneously. On Apple M4 Pro with 10.2 GB of cache budget, only 3 agents fit at 8K context in FP16. A…
Context lengths of Large Language Models (LLMs) have exploded in recent years, with 128k-token context becoming a standard and million-token context becoming a reality. Efficiently supporting long-context inference remains challenging as…
LLM decoding is bottlenecked for large batches and long contexts by loading the key-value (KV) cache from high-bandwidth memory, which inflates per-token latency, while the sequential nature of decoding limits parallelism. We analyze the…
Multi-head latent attention (MLA) is designed to optimize KV cache memory through low-rank key-value joint compression. Rather than caching keys and values separately, MLA stores their compressed latent representations, reducing memory…
Large Language Models (LLMs) encounter severe memory inefficiencies during long-context inference due to conventional handling of key-value (KV) caches. In this work, we introduce a novel integration of PagedAttention with PyTorch's…
The KV cache in self-attention has emerged as a major bottleneck in long-context and large-batch inference for LLMs. Existing approaches often treat sparsity prediction and compression as separate modules, relying on auxiliary index…